Spooks
by napoleons
Summary: AU LoK based around the British Intelligence Service. Korra is a bright young field agent with a bit of a reputation and a knack for getting herself into trouble. She and her team will stop at nothing to bring Amon and his drug-running supergang down. Eventual Amon/Korra. One-sided Mako/Korra. A cheeky bit of Bolin/Jinora.
1. Chapter 1

Crouching in the undergrowth isn't exactly among the techniques she'd been taught as overly covert. For anyone who was looking, the dark-haired girl hiding (and not particularly well) in the bushes is clearly up to something. Tahno's voice is bleeding obnoxiously through her com, and in a fit of temper she is tempted to rip it out of her ear and throw it away, into the river. Then she would be well and truly screwed - Iroh would no doubt chew her out good and proper when she slunk back into base and there would be countless disciplinary actions to follow. How disappointed her old mentor, and her uncle, Tenzin, would be. She can imagine the severe points of his eyebrows already.

"Korra, come in," Tahno repeats, and she can see his lip curling as he says it, "Iroh has called the mission off. It's too dangerous. Lose your tail and come back to the safe house."

She knows she's pretty infamous for being stupidly gung-ho, but she is just as well-known for producing results. It's not like the backhanded whispers in the cold, clinical halls of the base back in London go completely unnoticed. She might be overly passionate and a bit too eager, but she is not stupid. Surely that is obvious enough in her track record. One of Britain's secret service's bright young things: a field agent at twenty one, in hard-target countries by twenty three.

Korra grits her teeth together, before whispering a hurried reply: "I can get him," she insists, because she knows she can. She's old and experienced enough now to know when she is out of her depth, and right now she isn't. The target is sitting in a streetside bazaar with a cup of something cradled between his hands and she is in the bush, waiting. If she unfolded herself and walked nonchalantly away, that would be it. Hours of toil in a London office block gathering intelligence for nothing.

"If you go ahead with this you'll be off grid," Tahno warns her, though there is nothing like caution in his voice. It is thin, and reedy and a little bit grating, almost as if he is baiting her into doing it. She convinces herself that if it were Iroh's smooth lilt then she might have taken her orders into account. As it is, she pulls the com out of her ear and buries it into the roots of the bush. Best not to have it on her person if things get out of hand later.

"I'm going to get him," she says with a smirk, knowing that Tahno can hear her but not reply. She wonders then if he smiles, or smacks his palms into the desk in frustration. They have not always gotten along.

She finally stands up, making time to stretch out her hamstrings and her shoulders. She walks into the bazaar with the nonchalant curiosity of a tourist, though her actions are anything but - she haggles discreetly with a little old woman selling hats from a stall for a straw sunhat, and then moves over to browse traditional Chinese wear, ornate silk jackets and matching slippers. She arranges the sunhat over her hair, which she had cut short and dyed a darker colour than usual, in a typically seen style around this particular city. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the target putting down his cup, and glancing around himself before moving out into the street. She buys a street map from a neighbouring vendor, and follows him.

He is not particularly discerning - seeing as he had started off as her tail, lost her, and regained her without his knowledge - and by the time he reaches his destination Korra is not being as careful as she should have been. She is marching down the street with her face stuck in the street map (if it is impossible to blend in, stand out in the most usual of ways) and when something hard jostles her she looks first in the direction of the man she had been following. He is stood stock still, lingering on the edge of a back alley with a paper-white face, eyes wide and eyebrows high on his forehead, staring right at her. Or, more appropriately, at the man she had just bumped into. Before she can move to follow, he turns and disappears into the dark. Only then does she turn her attention towards the man who she had just bumped into. His hand has curled hard around her wrist and he tugs her towards him, into his chest. He smells familiar, and she swallows thickly.

"Hasook..." she says, and the quality of her voice drops down into a whine.

"You should have listened to mother," he growls into her ear, his fingers pushing into the sinews in her arms until it burns. "And none of this would have had to happen. It is such a shame, Korra. You had so much potential."

Potential that was going to go to waste, now. He twists them into position with an ease that comes from a lot of practise, and the fact that Korra's body is as malleable as putty, with the gun pressed into the small of her back there was not much else that she could do. They walk towards the back alley her tail had disappeared into, wrapped against each other like a young couple blissfully in love.

There is no bargaining she could do now, no reasoning with this traitor. The two of them had been intimately acquainted before. There was nothing that brought people closer together than acting as field agents on the same mission. They had been undercover together in Russia, when Korra was still a rookie. The same mission had brought to light Hasook's as a double agent for the other side - a small fact brought into the system by the very girl he had his arms wrapped around now. He might break her neck, the way he was holding her. Or shoot out her stomach. He had a vast array of options, though only one was acceptable.

"The boss wants to meet you," he says, gruffly, betraying the fact that either previous option that resulted in the girl's instant death would have been vastly preferable.

"The boss?"

"Don't pretend that you're stupid, Korra," he spits, and then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand in distaste, "it doesn't suit you."

"They'll find me," she warns him then, eyebrows pulled together and lips harshly pursed.

"Oh, no they won't," Hasook is smirking, then, intolerably smug, "that little trick you pulled back at the bazaar made sure of that. You are firmly off-grid, kiddo."

* * *

**A/N: **This is very much an AU, based around the British Intelligence Service (though by no means accurate). It's going to be a bit of a multishipper thing because that is good for drama and I don't particularly ship anything in LoK so I am open to pretty much anything! Bending doesn't exist in this, unfortunately for Korra at this moment in time! more will be revealed very soon, this is pretty much just a taster! I hope you enjoyed, and if you did (or didn't) be sure to tell me by reviiiiewwwinggg!

_This is being reuploaded from [flubetoob] another account of mine :) _


	2. Chapter 2

Wherever they have taken her is underground. She can tell almost immediately, despite the throbbing in her head where Hasook had smacked her viciously with the barrel his gun. Her hair is plastered to her face with sweat and probably blood - and god knows what had happened to her pretty straw sunhat. Even without a mirror she supposes she is currently quite unfit for the public eye. She is in some sort of cramped space, with her hands tied behind her back. When she tries to stretch out her knees, the sharp pang in them tells her she's been immobile for quite a while. It's the boot of a car, carpeted but old and musty and there's something else in there with her, something cold and hard and definitely not another person.

Fucking idiots, she thinks gleefully when she figures out what it is. A wheel nut wrench for changing tyres. What kind of imbeciles has she gotten herself caught up with? At least, she decides, it'll be easy enough to get herself out once she's gotten the cable ties off of her wrists and the door open.

There is enough room behind her for her to reach out her arms towards her head - it takes a while in the cramped space but on the third try of forcing her bound wrists back down into the small of her back, the cable tie snaps and flies off, zinging against the bared metal near her feet. She waits for a myriad of strangled voices, but there is nothing more than the previous muffled silence. Next she searches for a release handle, or cable, but the car is old enough not to have one, which makes an almost silent escape impossible. Escaping through the back seats seems the next logical solution. She wriggles around so that her feet are pressed up against the seat, and she pushes. It pops loose easily enough, and she picks up the crowbar before easing her head out first to take in her surroundings. An underground car park. Flashing yellow lights hanging across the roof give the place a dingy, unloved air. There is no natural light in her line of vision. The car is deserted, so she crawls through into the back seat and reaches for the door. An empty click reveals that it is locked, but like most older cars it is connected to the drivers side lock, which is simple enough for her to reach - and with that she is out into the open, surrounded by floor to ceiling, wall to wall concrete.

A few years ago, being stuck in this place would have sent shivers down her spine. Now she merely puts the crowbar on top of the car and stretches herself out, cracks her spine, jumps up and down a little to limbre herself up, ignoring the pangs and aches of her body's protestations to such activity after so long lying prone in the back of a car. She has to be ready for the worst.

In this frame of mind it is difficult for her to focus enough to feel stupid for falling for that little trick back at the market; she is firmly in instinctive fight or flight mode and Korra has never been a very apprehensive type of girl.

Instead, she is the kind to act now, and think later.

A frame of reference that comes into focus very sharply when two men saunter lazily in through the garage entrance a few metres away, on the other side of the car. Without thinking she ducks out of sight, and only then realises that she had left the crowbar on the roof of the car.

"Hey, what's that?" one of the men says in Mandarin that Korra haltingly translates, before springing up onto the roof of the car, her fingers grasping at the crowbar in the process. "How the fuck did she get out?" he screams, and the madness that ensues feels as familiar to her as breathing.

Both of their mouths fall open, and Korra cannot help but smirk, wildly, her sticky, bloody face a sore sight to behold, and before they can even reach for the outlines of guns she can see against their jackets, she has thrown herself at them, crowbar brandished hard into one of their chests. He stumbles backwards and falls; not quite down and still a danger with that holstered gun. Still, she turns her attention to the other man who is still fumbling (these idiots who locked her in a car with a crowbar for company) and she smacks him upside the chin with the hunk of metal. He drops heavily and allows her to give chase to the first fellow, who had begun to make a dash for the exit. She wonders briefly, lazily, like a cat with a mouse, what Iroh would have to say about his honour. He is panicked and easy enough for her to catch; a sweep of the crowbar from his right ear down to his left shoulder sends him out with a dull thud and he drops. It is a hassle to drag him all the way back to the car, but she does so anyway, to deposit his body with his comrades in the resealed boot. There will be no room for either of them to maneuver easily upon waking, the way she had.

Once she has closed the lid of the car on them, she examines the handguns she had taken from the holsters within their suits. One with four rounds and one with five: they will improve her chances of escaping vastly and she is pleased as punch with them.

The exit at the end of the garage gives way to a ramp rising unsteadily upwards. Unfortunately, it is shaped like a spiral so that she is never quite sure of what is coming. How inconvenient. However, she makes it to the top without incident and spills out into another garage, though this one looks much more commercial, lined with silver Mercedes and black Porches. There are various doors along the edge of the car park and it is with great deliberation that she decides to investigate these further rather than simply making a dash for the exit. Coming back with information would mean a promotion, perhaps to team leader, whereas on the other hand, crawling back bloodied and bruised to the safe house without anything would mean a disciplinary hearing and most likely a demotion. She had worked far too hard for that, and so she falls to further examination of the situation.

The door she picks leads into a long, empty corridor, at the end of which lies an unassuming elevator. At least, until she presses the button for it, whereupon the doors open to a plush mahogany lined square with classical music playing lavishly over the tannoy system. Before stepping into the security camera's line of vision, she shoots it out, and enters the elevator undetected. Looking at the choice of buttons, there is no where to go but up. The penthouse suite.

Stairs would have been indefinitely safer, but she goes up uninterrupted and the long corridor (framed with pictures, this time, and wall to wall, shining wood instead of concrete) provides a service hatch containing a workman's uniform - shapeless grey overalls that she slips over her own clothes, a grey cap that she tucks her short hair into and a bucket filled with cleaning implements that she stows her stolen handguns in. There is nothing for it but to leave the crowbar in the service hatch. It would garner too much attention.

Offence obviously being the best defence, she strides up to the door at the end of the corridor and knocks boldly, standing with one hip cocked and a bored expression on her face - fuck, her face! She hadn't wiped it! She was standing there covered in blood and grime and - oh god, the door opens slowly. The man standing in the frame sports a moustache common - and better left - in the 1970's. He is tall and lean and wearing a pinstriped suit with a dark purple tie. Korra eyes the bucket in her hand purposefully, and the man sighs as his lip curls upwards in distaste.

"They get dirtier and uglier every day," he says over his shoulder to some companion in the apartment behind him, "get on with it," and that is directed at Korra the 'maid', short and sharp and if this is the way he always talks to the staff then she despairs for them.

She scurries off into the apartment and he slams the door closed behind her.

"Oi!" the reprimand chases her, and she considers simply outrunning it, but then where would she be? With a shoulders purposefully low and disinterested, she slowly turns towards him. "Take off your bloody shoes, will you? This carpet is worth more than you'll earn in your lifetime."

Nodding, she reaches down to pull off her shoes, and pads back towards the door to place them on the mat. As she does so, she gets a glimpse into the study. It contains an imposing figure of a man, with slicked back dark hair and a regal posture, with his back to her. His suit is dark grey and expensively tailored, and she is gawping before the thin pinstriped man glares at her and closes the door heavily in her face.

That study is where she is where she needs to be - but such a feat is beyond even her, with the two of them in there, and so she makes do with what she can find. Sheaves of paper in what appears to be the master bedroom, various files on the kitchen top, and then she stumbles across something important. A mirage, they often called it. A whirring computer in the middle of a download - and it was downloading something useful, something from a memory stick. Computers are not really her strong point - she leaves that to her usual analysts, Tahno and Asami Sato, back in London, who is head of her division for reasons Korra suspects other than her own talent - but she knows to mute the sound before anything else. The download is seventy three percent through according to the screen, but tough luck for these guys, she rips it out of the USB port and buries it deep in her bucket of cleaning supplies.

She is slipping her shoes back on and attempting to silently open the apartment door when the two men emerge from the study. Pinstripe glowers and crosses his arms over his chest, beginning a tirade of spite directed at her that starts "you cannot possibly be finished yet," and Korra would make some excuse to leave except her accented Mandarin would give her away, and the other man in the smart suit is striding out towards the room Korra had just vacated and fuck she needs to get out but Pinstripe's hand is holding the door closed, fuck,

"Lew, the download has stopped," he calls, and Pinstripe - Lew - mumbles something about fucking technology and removes his hand from the door, moves down along the corridor. Korra's heart is in her mouth but for now they think it's a technological fault and she's going to get out okay and she reaches for the door handle - "she's taken the memory stick!"

Pinstripe wheels around but Korra's hand is already in the bucket and the shotgun is pointed up and her finger is pressed against the trigger and he's clutching at the crimson hole in his neck and screaming -no, gurgling - and the other man appears in the hallway. He seems shadowed, although he can't be, there is no strong source of light in the hall. He is not armed but he acts as though he is - there is no vulnerability in his stance, or on his face. A face just as regal as his posture, long and bold and Korra can feel it etching itself behind her eyelids. The slow flicker of amusement on his lips chills her to the bone.

"Stop," he croons, and she doesn't know where the sudden ache deep in her stomach to comply comes from, but she ignores it anyway, and shoots. The bullet catches his hip and without stopping to consider what had happened - how she will beat a hasty retreat - she turns and flies out of the apartment, down the stairs, two at a time, and when she spills out into the street the light almost blinds her. The smog of the city closes down around her, and the sound of the cars and the alarm blaring in the apartment building she had just vacated pursues her mercilessly. A nearby woman sees the gun in her hand and screams, loud and shrill. Korra drops the weapon into the bucket and covers it with a cloth, crosses the street erratically (weaving deftly in and out of the speeding cars) and disappears into the bustling crowd surging down the side of the road.

Far, far above her, the man in the grey suit presses a handkerchief into his bleeding hip, and watches her head bobbing through the crowd until she disappears from sight.

* * *

**_NEXT TIME_:**

"I'm fine, thank you," she replies, cowed. She wants to shoulder the door open, roll out and run for her life. Instead she looks out at the airfield, and sees Iroh standing beside a small jet, waiting for her. Perhaps the blow to the head ruffled her more than she had thought at first. Perhaps she is mistaken.

"Get out," he says, gruff and completely English, wrenching himself around in the drivers seat so that they are looking straight at each other, "and remember that I will come for you soon, Korra."

She cannot get out of the car quick enough. The door opens, and she falls out hard onto her left shoulder before the car's tyres screech as the man pulls the car away at high speed.

"That's him!" she screams, "it's him," and Iroh is at her side, hands on her shoulders, shaking her, asking if she's alright, maybe, but she's not _oh god she's not_ -


	3. Chapter 3

"This is a very serious matter, Korra," Iroh's face is lined and serious as he flips through the array of papers piled up at Korra's bedside. She is sitting placidly while a cheery, bright-eyed nurse checks the stitches in her forehead. When she has finished she applies a fresh dressing and pulls back with some chattering Mandarin that Korra cannot even begin to fathom in her current state. Iroh thanks her - or something like that, Korra isn't exactly sure - and she rushes off to her next patient.

"She likes you," Korra says, sing-songing like a little girl in the playground. She can't exactly blame her. Iroh is traditionally handsome, despite the early lines in his skin from too many years of being far too serious, and besides that, he is always impeccably dressed.

(Didn't Jinora always say that a man in a good suit was to women what a model in lingerie was to a man?)

Iroh sighs. "Please try to pay attention Korra."

"Do you know how much morphine they've pumped into my system?" she is almost giddy with it, feeling like she's floating a few inches up off the bed. Iroh sighs again, and Korra wants to pet him on the head she way she always did with the family labrador back home.

"That's part of the problem. We need to get you on a flight back to London as soon as possible, before Amon and his cronies manage to find out where you are."

"Like they would be a problem. I shot Pinstripe right in the neck! That sucker. Got 'em both. Like fucking... like I'm John Wayne, or some shit," she giggles and grins and closes her eyes and Iroh silently despairs.

"You did get them," he tells her, smoothing her hair back off of her face. She looks far too pale, and he is worried. The stupid girl had never been able to follow orders. The good she had done for the service however, was undeniable. Bei Fong would be singing the girl's praises when they got back home. A promotion was on the horizon, he guessed, but that was not necessarily a good thing. She would get into all sorts of trouble without him keeping a careful watch over her. It was only because he had managed to track her down that she hadn't been caught, delirious and heavily bleeding, by the Chinese law enforcement for carrying a gun around in public areas. "Get some rest," he says tiredly although she is already asleep, and decides to keep a twenty-four hour watch on her bedside until a plane to Heathrow could be arranged.

After struggling in his suit pocket for his phone, he dials the number of one of his most trusted assets: "Mako? It's Iroh. I'm bringing you in."

The hospital is dark, and vast, and empty. Korra pads down the cold hallway wearing soft, cotton pyjamas, with nothing on her feet. Her arms are bare, and she shivers a little in the chilled air. Every room she passes is lit with soft white light, but when she looks inside they are always completely and utterly empty. She is utterly alone in this vast space where her footsteps echo and her fingers tremble against her thighs. It is an eerie feeling. Eventually she comes to the end of the width of the hospital, and the door she stands in front of now must lead onto stairs, she thinks. Instead, upon opening it a lavish room of mahogany and red silks is revealed to her. The air smells of cinnamon and pine needles. In the middle of the room lies the largest, softest looking bed Korra has ever seen. She moves towards it without meaning to, almost floating across the hardwood floor.

She lays her head down on the softest pillow, and when the arm wraps itself around her middle she feels nothing but contentment. Behind her is something breathing, something soft and warm and bulky and she presses back into it. It's breath is hot on her neck, searing little butterfly kisses into her neck until she shudders. It's fingers trail down the long slope of her jaw, catches her chin and ever so softly turns her to face it.

Next to her lies the man in the grey suit, smirking and trailing his hand along her body, caressing her shoulder, tantalisingly slow all the way along the ridge of her torso, then resting possessively on her hip. "We shall meet again very soon, darling girl," he says, and she smiles lazily at him.

"I might get you again, if you're not careful," she says, smirking, but her voice echoes and when it comes back from the walls it sounds like gunshots, stark and terrifying. His hand at her hip burns and burns and suddenly she rips herself away from him, off of the bed and into the corner, her back pressed hard against the wall. He pursues her, his shoulders hunched and he is huge and nothing but a shadow, pressing ever closer. She screws her eyes closed and fists her hands at her side. She is ready, she is -

Korra awakes strangely calmly in total darkness, aside from the low-light of the medical instruments at the side of her bed. She feels carefully down her arm for the cannula but before she can pull it out she is disturbed - a warm hand clasping down on her lower arm very gently. After recent events, however, she is not easily placated. Despite her weakened condition and the restrictions in place from the various wires and IV drips surrounding her body, she grips the offending hand and twists it back until the bedside light switched on and the face of the person who had grabbed her swims into focus.

"Mako!" it was an effort to restrain herself - caught between grabbing his pale, pointed face in her hands and kissing him, or punching the living daylights out of him. Before, they had been even more intimately acquainted than was usual between two field agents, but things had ended badly between them in North Korea and she hadn't seen him since. "What are you doing here?!"

She quickly drops him, and his hand falls slowly into the mattress beside her thigh. He makes no attempt to move it. His face is more pointed than usual - probably sore over her hurting him and not wanting her to realise it - and the memories flood back quicker than she thought they would have. Mako stitching a wound on her hip, Mako pushing her hair back from her eyes, Mako kissing her when he shouldn't have - he had something with Asami, something that meant he shouldn't be kissing other girls - but that hadn't stopped either of them, their legs tangled together despite the constant ripping of the stitches in her hip, his hands hot on the small of her back.

"Iroh asked me to watch you," he says, very softly, so that she has to strain herself to hear him.

Korra nods, slowly, and turns her face away from him. She doesn't know how to act, when things are like this. Guns blazing, spur-of-the-moment passion, that she can handle. This softness - she doesn't like it, she cannot understand it.

"Whatever he found on that memory stick must be important," she muses, despite not knowing whether Mako had clearance for such knowledge.

He does - should she have expected anything less, from him?

"You'll find out soon enough. When we are away from prying ears. How's your head feeling?"

"Fine. A little tender. It's to be expected I suppose," she is efficient with him now, afraid that they will fall back into things as they were, before. It would be all too easy, "having the strangest morphine dreams."

"Oh yeah?" the small smile on his face is half-smug and half-concerned, and before he can ask what about she continues:

"Yeah. The guy I stole that USB from features quite a bit. Always touching me inappropriately," she smirks widely as she feels his hand tense on the bed next to her. He is quiet for a moment, and then he is thoughtful in reply.

"The quicker you get back to London the better. Iroh's arranged for a morning flight. You should get some more sleep."

"D'you think he's gonna come after me? That I can't handle him?" she can't help the slight bitterness in her voice, then.

"I think he might. And like this, you wouldn't have much of a chance escaping him again. Not him." She wonders who this strange grey-suited man is, to inspire such uncertainty in Mako, who had been indomitable in her eyes for so long.

She scoffs under her breath, but sleep comes easily - especially with him so close by, his hand very close to hers on top of the sheets, warm and forgiving, - and when she wakes up with the daylight streaming in through the thin curtains it is Tahno sitting disinterestedly on the chair beside the bed instead of Mako. He is examining his cuticles when she shuffles upwards on the pillows, legs and arms and spindly bones against the sheets.

"Morning, sleeping beauty," he says, and the sarcasm drips off of his tongue like honey.

Korra grins up at him with raw, delighted abandon, because she knows if she had listened to him she wouldn't be in this mess. If she had listened to him the service would be missing vital information about the world's most ruthless gang boss.

"It's nice to see you again, mum. Not in too much trouble, am I?"

Their relationship is tenuous, at the best of times.

"You're grounded for the rest of the year, Korra," he says dryly, and throws his eyes up at the ceiling, "get dressed. We have a flight to catch in an hour."

"Is... is it just me and you?" she asks, trying to figure out how to find out if Mako was going to be back in England with being so obvious. It doesn't work. Tahno bridges his fingers on his knees like the villain from an old black and white spy flick, and laughs.

"Lover boy has business here, still. He's back in the field. You're riding the airwaves back to Blighty all on your lonesome, I'm afraid."

She groans, and buries her face in the pillow until he leaves and closes the door behind him. The cheery little nurse comes in to remove the wires attaching Korra to the various medical apparatus and leaves with a disappointed smile curving her lips - the abrupt removal of this strange young girl must be the reason for the disappearance of the handsome young man who had accompanied her before. Korra dresses herself shakily, in the smart fitted trouser suit Tahno had provided, and slips a pair of aviator sunglasses on. Her black eyes now invisible, the only thing that renders her different from every other business woman roaming the streets is the fresh wound on her face, and her bedraggled hair. She persuades Tahno to plait it for her when he comes back in to collect her - he complains viciously but does it with a quick efficiency that suggests he has done it many times before.

Before she is swallowed by the imposing black car that will whisk her to a private airfield to a private jet to London, home sweet home, Tahno takes her hand in his and squeezes it. A silent sign of compassion that she had not expected. She smiles at him and squeezes back, before she ducks into the back seat of the car.

"Good morning, miss," the driver says pleasantly as she buckles herself into the backseat. She nods but her face is straight, and stoic, and she says nothing cheery in reply. It is not a particularly good morning, if the searing pain in her forehead is anything to go by. "If you don't mind me saying, you look a little worse for wear."

"I do mind," she snaps, and has to sit on her hands to avoid fiddling with the stitches in her skin, "my head is pounding like I've been on a weekend long bender and fallen out of a third storey window onto my head, so the last thing I want to be doing is attempting to translate a language I've always been second-best at comprehending."

"I'll speak English, if you prefer," he says, in a vaguely American sounding accent, but she merely grimaces and turns to look out of the window. He gets the hint. Once they are out of the city she turns her head back to face forward and realises that the large set of his shoulders is vaguely familiar. His slicked back hair underneath the drivers cap reminds her of something slinky from a half-remembered dream. At the airfield he glances into the rearview mirror and she sees his eyes, the shade shocking shade of blue as before and she stiffens in the seat.

"Are you alright, miss?" he asks in that strangely accented English, and she nods.

"I'm fine, thank you," she replies, cowed. She wants to shoulder the door open, roll out and run for her life. Instead she looks out at the airfield, and sees Iroh standing beside a small jet, waiting for her. Perhaps the blow to the head ruffled her more than she had thought at first. Perhaps she is mistaken.

"Get out," he says, gruff and completely English, wrenching himself around in the drivers seat so that they are looking straight at each other, "and remember that I will come for you soon, Korra."

She cannot get out of the car quick enough. The door opens, and she falls out hard onto her left shoulder before the car's tyres screech as the man pulls the car away at high speed.

"That's him!" she screams, "it's him," and Iroh is at her side, hands on her shoulders, shaking her, asking if she's alright, maybe, but she's not oh god she's not -

"Korra!" Iroh shouts over her screaming, his fingers digging into her flesh almost painfully, "it was who?"

"The man... in the grey suit. From the apartment," she hisses, and Iroh's face falls. He lets her go so quickly she falls back down onto her elbows.

"Get after him!" but it is too late - he's gone.

"Iroh," Korra's voice is weak from exertion, but she is not, hard-faced and adamant, "who the fuck is that man?"

He explains everything on the aeroplane, with the help of a touchscreen artificial intelligence provided by the Sato industry. The man in the grey suit is known by his 'followers' as Amon - a notorious gangster who up until Korra had raided the apartment block he and his right hand man 'the Lieutenant' had been occupying had been a shadow on the blot of the world's intelligence agencies. The closest anyone had ever got to identifying him before was the CIA when he was operating from a base in Alaska, but that mission had been blown by a couple of overstepping rookies. MI6 had pulled their best double agents from Russia and China to infiltrate Amon's ranks, but further information about that was way above her classification level.

When the plane touched down at Heathrow it was all that Korra could do to keep her eyes open. Iroh's concerned face was beginning to irritate her, and she couldn't wait to burst out of the plane doors. Another ominous black car was awaiting her arrival and she had made up her mind to thoroughly check her driver's identity this time, but there was no need. As she walked across the tarmac the back door open and her uncle Tenzin unfolded himself from the back seat, all long limbs and severity.

She can barely control herself then. She wants to run and throw herself at him and sob, but that is hardly the behaviour of an MI6 field agent, so she forces herself to slowly saunter towards the car, and when she reaches him she doesn't even have to worry - he wraps his arms around her shoulders and pulls her into his chest.

"Welcome home, Korra," he says, "you're safe now."

And she believes him.

* * *

_**NEXT TIME:**_

"Kill me, then," she says, utterly brusque, almost growling with her hackles raised.

He laughs in response, this Amon, this snake-charmer of a man, all twists and turns and smoke and mirrors. "I do not kill the things I want, Korra." He says it as if it is an obvious concept that she, the stupid, slow child, has yet to grasp.

"I don't understand," she replies haltingly. She is confused, but more than anything she is uncomfortable: held up against him so tightly that she can feel the slow, deliberate beat of his heart against her shoulder. He is warm and solid and not altogether unpleasant, and not is not what she should be thinking at all. In response to these _revelations,_ she begins to struggle against him, and the knife at her throat presses closer to her skin, with more urgency this time.


	4. Chapter 4

Tenzin took her home.

Not to the home she'd known as a child up in the wilds of Scotland, beaten and battered by snow and cold and ice rain, but the sprawling London townhouse she'd known as a bright-eyed schoolgirl, sixteen and eagerly waiting for something, _anything_ exciting to happen to her.

Almost as soon as they're in the front door the tension that had slowly been building within Korra drops. The smell of Pema's baking and Meelo's carrying voice and the contrasting music coming from either end of the house in the girl's rooms settles her nerves better than anything else could have. She dumps her bags by the stairs and strolls into the kitchen to find Pema seated on a breakfast bar stool, reading a magazine... and decidedly rounder than usual.

"Pema! Why didn't you tell me?!" Korra glares accusingly at Tenzin but he doesn't linger in the room, he rubs the back of his neck sheepishly and makes a dash for the stairs, making some half-hearted excuse about putting sheets on her bed and taking her bags up to her room.

"Tenzin said we couldn't get a hold of you while you were working in the field," Pema says, dryly now she realises that they could have, "it was all a bit of a surprise anyway."

Korra beams over at her, pressing her palms into the top of the breakfast bar. "Well it's great news! Just what I needed to hear. Congratulations."

Ikki and Meelo come squealing through into the kitchen then, "Korra's back, Korra's back! Did you bring us anything?" and then comes Jinora looking nonchalant in her school uniform, her hair cut short and her face showing the barest traces of makeup. It's the transformation in Jinora that makes Korra realise how long she's been away.

"I did," she tells the two kids, ruffling their hair (though Ikki protests a little in an indifferent attempt to be more like her older sister) "I'll get them later, though. Let me take my shoes off first!"

Jinora smiles, and moves to sit next to her mother on the breakfast bar. She twirls her hair around one of her fingers until she feels as though she has Korra's attention, and then she says: "what happened to your face?"

There is a sudden, tense silence in the room. Even Meelo is quiet, and that is a miracle.

"Jinora!" Pema scolds, but Korra is already holding her palms up in a surrendering gesture.

"It's okay," she soothes, "you know how dangerous my line of work is, Jin. Things like this happen."

That is not enough explanation for the curious sixteen year old, Korra knows that well enough. She would have been the same at that age - she probably still would be now. Instead of elaborating upon the subject at Jinora's raised brow, Korra changes the subject:

"Have you seen much of Bolin recently?" The change in the teenager is abrupt. Her face flushes and she turns her sweet, open face away from her cousin. Her shoulders slump a little and she casts a few nervous glances towards her mother.

"A little," she admits, but Pema is already interrupting before her daughter has finished speaking, knowing in the way that all mother's are when their daughters are involved.

"A little! He's here most nights for dinner, and helping Jin with her homework," (the look on Jinora's face makes Korra wonder how much school work goes on when the two of them are alone together) "we can hardly get rid of him! Though we don't want to really, he is a lovely boy, and I remember how much you appreciated my cooking when you had just started up at the office, Korra."

Korra can remember it vividly, as well. The endless nights surviving on coffee and iced buns in conference rooms buried in paperwork had not been exactly to her liking. Korra is a woman of action, after all. She understands Bolin's need to come to Pema's for dinner so often very well indeed.

"Are we being graced with his company tonight?" Korra asks.

"He'll be here in about forty five minutes," Jinora replies, a little too eagerly, and turns her face away when Korra smirks over at her. She awkwardly tucks her hair behind her ear, but it is too short to stay put and falls back into place almost straight away.

"Korra!" It is Meelo then - the strength of his patience worn thin.

"Okay, okay," Korra says, grinning and shrugging her shoulders, "I'll go get them."

She trudges up the stairs with aching bones and tired muscles, and when she opens her bedroom door to find Tenzin sitting on her bed with a Sato tablet in his hands, she is almost relieved. This will be her official debriefing, she supposes, Tenzin's way of traumatising her the least amount possible. She closes the door behind her and sits down next to him, the familiar creak of the mattress springs settling the nerves that had arisen again in her stomach.

"We need to talk about what happened in the car, with Amon."

Korra nods her head in agreement.

"Nothing really," she tells him, "he acted the part of chauffeur perfectly. He called me miss. He asked me if I was alright. He said he would come for me, and then threw me out of the door. I'm in no denial of what his intentions might be. I shot his best man through the neck, for all we know, he's dead. The way they were acting up in that apartment they might have been more than friends, I don't know. It might be a personal vendetta."

"Korra, you mustn't make judgements without sufficient proof," he warns, and god how well she knows that.

"I know," she sighs heavily, and stands up again, moves towards the window to press her sore shoulder against the cold glass and looks forlornly into the dark street below, lit intermittently with eerie yellow street lamps. She can see a familiar dark haired boy in a dark green parka barrelling down the road, head bowed against the rain. She watches his progress with vague interest, and when he reaches the doorstep and a small, pale hand reaches out and grabs his coat and pulls him out of sight she smiles a little to herself. "Besides," she continues, turning to face Tenzin, pressing her back against the glass now, "he won't catch me that weak again. We'll fix this sore, sorry world one disease at a time," her face is contorted in disgust and Tenzin wants to tell her that such emotions don't have any place in the heart or mind of a well-respected field agent. He wants to tell her that, but he doesn't want her to end up becoming some cold-cut machine like Lin Bei Fong - that had given him enough heartache the first time around.

"Bolin's here," she says to break the heavy silence that has fallen between them, "we should go downstairs."

Tenzin agrees and when he exits her room he leaves the door ajar. She rifles through her luggage for the little gifts she had gotten the children, odds and ends from the city markets and a traditional silk jacket for each of them, an old book of Chinese script for Jinora.

Dinner is delicious as expected, old style stew with farmhouse bread, just what both Korra and Bolin had needed. The two of them sit next to each other and Korra pretends she doesn't notice the glances between him and her cousin as they catch up on news. She tells him that she met Mako in China, and that he was fine and chipper enough, his usual self. He told her that Mako wasn't seeing Asami anymore, that he was surprised his brother hadn't told her. He wanted to tell her that he was falling in love with Jinora and it was totally inappropriate, and ask her for some sisterly advice, but then Jinora's foot presses delicately against his shin underneath the table and for a second their eyes meet as she pretends to be immersed in the book Korra had brought her, and he completely forgot about wanting to ask Korra anything at all.

She always missed this when she was away; the familial chatter and ignorance of each other's feelings; the insults passed like condiments around the table.

After Bolin has gone back to base - Korra is almost tempted to go with him, as if she misses the stale coffee and stacks of paperwork telling tall tales of the adventures had by almost everyone else but her - and Pema and the children are washing the dishes, Tenzin pulls her aside and tells her in hushed, hurried tones that there has been a development that required his urgent attention. "You can come into the office as well, if you want," he adds, but his voice is tentative, and although she wants to (almost desperately) she politely declines.

"I'm a little tired," (_after my ordeal_, it goes unsaid but the words hang in the air anyway, unspoken, "you go ahead, I'll catch up on some sleep here."

His sigh of relief is barely contained at all, and she has to quell the surge of irritation quickening in her stomach. "That's probably for the best," he squeezes her forearm between his fingers briefly, "there'll be plenty of time for you to be briefed when you're feeling better."

Korra is awoken by the sound of the rain pattering against the window, and the nearby roar of traffic and occasional drunken shout; she had grown up in the rugged north, in the stark Scottish wilderness, and despite all this time spent in London, she had never grown immune to the nighttime clamour of the city. She hadn't shut the blinds and insipid yellow light comes in through the window in slats. According to the digital alarm on her bedside table - the numbers garishly green - it is three o'clock in the morning, and far too early to be up and out of bed. She must still be working on a Shanghai body clock. Groaning half-heartedly into her hands, she presses her face into the warmth of her pillow and tries without success to get back to sleep.

Minutes pass by slowly on the face of her clock, until she decides that lying in bed and thinking about the dreams she's been having - vivid and relentlessly terrifying - isn't particularly healthy, and swings herself out of bed. Barefoot, she pads into her bathroom and switches on the light. She considers showering, but remembers almost instantly that she is not on the job anymore, and that she has her family to think about. She won't disturb them. Instead, she runs the cold water for a while and splashes some of it onto her face. She hasn't thought clearly since before the incident in Shanghai. Her head feels thick and hazy; thinking has become a similar sort of process to swimming through custard, she imagines.

She goes back into her bedroom and hovers indecisively around the window.

She _should_ close the blinds to the outside distractions of the slowly waking world, and go back to sleep. Instead, she pulls them open, and rests her forehead against the cold glass. Her skin feels sticky when she eventually pulls back; her ears perked by the sound of the front door being carefully opened and very gently closed.

Tenzin must be home from the important meeting - and this is a good a time as any to find out what it had all been about, she thinks. She pulls a ratty old University hoodie over her pyjamas, and slips out of her room and almost silently slopes down the stairs, her right palm just grazing the old, smooth wooden bannister. There is low-light coming from the kitchen, the cabinet lights, she assumes, and brazenly she saunters through the door, cocky and smiling and all earnest whispers: "I'll have a cuppa, if you're mak-"

Korra never gets to finish her request.

The man's hand clamped down firmly around her mouth is warm and large, cupping her chin and pressing up against her nose. His breath is close on her neck, so restrictive that it cloys sourly and she squirms in his grasp. In response his grip tightens, one hand on her mouth and his arm around her waist, snaked around her arms so that she cannot raise them to fight him off.

"I told you I'd find you," he hisses close to her ear; and she would recognise that voice anywhere. She shudders, chills erupting on her bare arms and shoulder blades. If she could turn around she would see the self-satisfied smirk on his face, and be overcome with the urge to slap it straight off. "You'll be a good girl, and be quiet," she murmurs a loud, muffled protest against his palm, "or my marksmen will do what they're paid for," and then she falls deathly silent. She is not hazy enough with morphine and lack of sleep to misunderstand _that._

How had he gotten into the house? Tenzin was a government official, under the official protection of the state and country. If she was not safe from him here, where could she be safe? Panic rises in her stomach like bile, and she is worried that if he doesn't take his hand away from her mouth she might soon be sick.

"Quiet, now," he almost coos, and lazily removes his hand. It is replaced with the caress of a blade, freshly sharpened against the delicate skin of her neck. She complies, if only for the sake of Tenzin's slumbering wife and children.

"What do you want with me?" she manages to choke out, her voice low in her throat. It is an idiotic question, but at least it is better than quaking silently in terror. Her fingers are trembling, but his grip on her arms is tight enough that she can't put her hands in her hoodie pocket, to hide it, that terrible fear of him. This man who can follow her from Shanghai to London whilst under surveillance of the best analysts in the business; this man who breaks into politicians houses like it is playtime; this man who draws drops of crimson from her skin without second thought, then offers her a monogrammed handkerchief when he is done with her and lets her loose.

"I should've thought that was obvious," he purrs, brutal and enthralling all at once. "You were a passing whim, a fancy, of sorts," he continues, "but now - now it seems as if there is a personal vendetta between you and I."

She is almost waiting for him to say _darling girl_, almost waiting for him to sink the knife into her throat.

"Kill me, then," she says, utterly brusque, almost growling with her hackles raised.

He laughs in response, this Amon, this snake-charmer of a man, all twists and turns and smoke and mirrors. "I do not kill the things I want, Korra." He says it as if it is an obvious concept that she, the stupid, slow child, has yet to grasp.

"I don't understand," she replies haltingly. She is confused, but more than anything she is uncomfortable: held up against him so tightly that she can feel the slow, deliberate beat of his heart against her shoulder. He is warm and solid and not altogether unpleasant, and not is not what she should be thinking at all. In response to these _revelations,_ she begins to struggle against him, and the knife at her throat presses closer to her skin, with more urgency this time.

"You will soon."

She is sick to the back teeth with these cryptic innuendos! She gasps in exasperation and feels him go still behind her: the space between them seems thinner and thinner and the air in the room is tersely silent. Without a word, the knife is gone from her throat and something soft pressed there instead, by his hands for a moment before he is gone, swiftly and without another sound.

The minutes tick by on the big clock in the corner, and when she looks up at it, it is a quarter to five and already the sun is beginning to rise: she can see the pinkness of the sky through the bay windows.

Slowly, she allows herself to breathe. With Amon's white, blood-spotted handkerchief clutched in her hand, her knees tremble, and she sinks slowly to the floor. She sits quietly on the cold, hard kitchen tiles, and tries to slow the rapid thundering of her heart.

* * *

**A/N: **I thought I'd update everything together to bring it back up to date on this account! Hope this chapter was ok and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it :) xox


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